Let the Games Begin

Just as athletes grab their discuses and bobsleds to compete in age-old competitions every quadrennium, Harvard summer school students will this week unsheathe their pens, take their seats and hear some grad student shout their equivilent, "Let the Games Begin."

And although many will arrive much under-prepared for the ultimate intellectual game, there are few who will not have undergone Herculean efforts to create a gameplan for an exam, if not actually going the distance of having handfuls of facts at their fingertips.

But no matter how many facts the young and strong will bring with them, no student can tell what he will have to do nor can he cover every base when studying.

This can prompt him to consider breaching the rules of the game. Like every fair game, there are rules--and the golden rule of examinations is: You can't cheat.

The instinct to cheat creeps in during the trying moments of an exam or a game. Just as a pitcher may rub his baseball against an Emery Board when down 3-and-0 with the bases loaded, a student's eyes might want to wander when facing a clutch question.

This longing may be affected by the type of question (it's a lot easier to cheat on a true-false test than an essay exam) and it is certainly affected by frustration level. If you can't for the life of you remember one out of 100 multiple choice questions, it seems pretty darn stupid to risk the other 99 by looking over someone's shoulder. If you have gone through all 100 and haven't gotten one so far, you might feel you have less to lose by trying to pick up a couple answers the slimy way.

But more than frustration, the University's policy toward enforcing this most heinous of academic crimes has an unparalleled effect on the student's willingness to cheat.

The traditional method for fighting the theft of thought has been just that--traditional. It consists of putting a group of students in a room, making them put aside their outer garments and notebooks, and then letting them take the test under the scrutiny of proctors.

This method adds to the formality of the whole affair--you know something serious is going on when you have 10 people being paid to watch your every move for three hours.

This method of deterrence can backfire, though, as it distracts students from the fact that cheating is actually a wrong in itself. Students may not dismiss cheating because they have reasoned that it is immoral--but may dismiss it because they are afraid of being caught.

And on more practical grounds, there are never enough proctors in a large hall to look at every student all the time--or even long enough to prevent him from looking around. If a student wanted to cheat, he could do it without any problem in most imaginable cases.

But the system has a more insidious effect beyond making cheating like a crap shoot in which you win (steal the answer) or lose (get caught). It creates a situation in which the cheater is not committing a crime again his next-desk neighbor, but against a group of obnoxious people who bump his chair while he is trying to write his essay. It's not that proctors aren't nice people--and it is good that someone will do the task--but they really shouldn't have any effect on someone's decision to cheat or not. A student should have to feel as if he is committing a shameful wrong--like beating a helpless child--not an amoral kind of crime--like a hungry man who steals a loaf of bread. It should be wrong to cheat. (period) and not just wrong to get caught.

Some freaked-out colleges (and some not so weird, like Wellesley) seem to have realized this, and employ an alternative method to combat cheating--the "honor code" method. In this system, there are no "proctors"--just a room of test takers.

The system makes students realize that when they are cheating, they are doing more than playing a game against a proctor. Rather, it underlines a fact which is lost in the adversarial nature of the traditional scenario: that students are all in the same situation facing the exam.

The only way cheating seems fair in such a situation is if one bold guy shouts out "All right, let's all open our books for 30 seconds." All the students get the same advantage. In the traditional scenario, everyone is on their own against the proctors--here they are in it together. But no one would ever shout this out.

At the same time, it would be unrealistic to think hard-core cheaters would stop cheating just because the word "honor" is attached to the monitoring method. After all, if you cheat well, you can be an "honors" student.

So there is a tension because people are torn between the knowledge that they can cheat and the fear that their fellow students would tell on them.

So each student becomes a proctor--looking around and checking out if anyone else is cheating. People are making sure that no one is looking at their test, or at anyone else's. And it is a lot easier for one student to notice when someone two feet away is looking at his paper than a proctor from 25 feet.

This situation in many respects reflects the weaknesses of traditional method as students are pitted against each other as if they were pitted against an authority. In bringing students together, it may actually drive them further apart by forcing them to police each other. Anothger weakness with the system is that students should not have to waste their mental energy thinking about whether people will be cheating.

But it deserves serious discussion because it squarely addresses the wrongs of cheating: that you are hurting your peers. Your peers are responsible for making that clear, not some professor-surrogate.

Short of giving each test-taker his own room, there is no flawless scheme. Any exam monitoring method is problematic because it is based on a sour--but realistic--assessment of human nature. And that is one of the few things that is harder to change than Harvard's policies.